


The Shift of Snow

by nocrimeinthearchive



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 06:20:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocrimeinthearchive/pseuds/nocrimeinthearchive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quick response to a very basic idea: a neo-HYDRA, sprawling and tangled, drawing in angry young men from around the world in the modern era.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shift of Snow

Things like this begin silently. Not the avalanche of a riot and the roar of the streets - not even the shift of sliding snow in a few quiet words between friends. Just a thought. 

"What makes them so special? What did they do to deserve it?"

It isn't a new thought. It's one of the oldest thoughts there is. It reaches back down through the centuries, curling out from the have-nots to the haves: a wedge that grows to fill the great divide.

And there are always people waiting to hammer the wedge in a little deeper.

***

So somewhere in the world, someone is watching television. 

It's a he, probably; a he built out of expectations he's never quite matched. So he sits there, slightly shorter or taller than he could be, his arms a little too skinny or too fat, and in his head...

There are a lot of things. There's someone he wants to be and isn't. There's someone who is who he wants to be, and they're doing it all wrong. There's someone he wants to be with, and maybe they've already put paid to that idea, or maybe they just haven't noticed it yet. And these thoughts are sitting in his head, and they're rubbing up against each other, and the edges are beginning to fray and become a very angry question:

"Why not me? Why don't I deserve it?"

And then the news comes on. And on the news, there is New York. And there are The Avengers.

There's the rich one, the genius, who scratched and clawed his way out of a cave with a box of scraps. Everyone knows Tony Stark, and you can hate the rich, but it's hard to hate Iron Man.

There's the archer, Hawkeye, and what is there in him? Training, really. Conditioning. A man who has taken clay and moulded it into something far beyond earth and water. 

There's Thor, a god; there's The Hulk, a punishment for playing god. 

And then there are the lucky ones, and when all you have is "why not me" it is very, very easy to ask "why them". 

Even then, you can dismiss the Black Widow - she is, from the rumours, a victim rather than a volunteer. A Soviet experiment. An unwilling participant in plans that didn't even care about her name. And, for this he, it is so very comforting to dismiss a she. So when she fights, when she does things that no human can do, all he sees is a machine that has been designed, custom built from face to feet to be the perfect woman. A vessel to be filled with strategy and orders. 

But when he sees Captain America - and everyone knows the story of Captain America, the weedy kid who never won a fight and was then handed victory in a silver syringe - he thinks, there but for the malice of God go I. There, but for the choice of a man in a suit, is my glory. There are my arms and my legs. There is my speed and my strength. And all it took for him to get there was a government man to tick a box on a form.

And then the story finishes, and the next one starts, and - what? The government is spying on its citizens, maybe. It's bullying small countries. It's killed a man in Pakistan, and the man's wife, and the man's neighbours, and it is sitting behind a million soldiers and guns and the shield of Captain America and saying, "He was conspiring against us."

So the news finishes, and goes back to his show, and it all sits in the back of his head - "Why him? Why does he deserve it?"

***

It doesn't always cascade. Sometimes, it passes. A he has a good night's sleep, or a solid dinner, or the next day he gets a smile from a pretty girl, and eventually when he asks again, "Why him?" he answers himself, "Because Steve Rogers was a good man."

But for every fifty sparks that don't light there is one that does, and that night, it is lit by the frail blue glow of a computer screen as he asks the world all the questions that he can think of. 

People answer, of course. They have been waiting for the questions. They asked them themselves, once.

***

And like this, they grow. Or, more accurately, they multiply. Like a thousand other movements around the world, they simultaneously disseminate and coagulate, drawing in these disparate voices who ask themselves the small questions, the petty ones, and coaxing and caressing their thoughts until the petty questions seem like the big ones. 

A voice will ask: "Why did the government choose Steve Rogers?"   
And from a thousand miles away, an answer will arrive, and the only possible thing to think when you have finished reading is: "Why does the government get to choose?" 

A voice will ask: "Why does the government get to choose?"  
And the answer will arrive, and again, the next question is laid up for you to take: "Why don't they choose to give it to us all?"

A voice will ask: "Why don't they choose to give it to us all?"  
And the answer is glib, this time, sitting there on a message board or on a forum or the comments in some news article: "Because then we wouldn't need a government."

And his petty question that asks why he can't get an injection and have a body like Captain America has become a question about whether or not the United States Government is ruling for the people or over the people. 

They lose even more people along the way, inevitably. But the process is sound. They don't want the ones who are dissatisfied with their answers. They don't want anyone who thinks they are over-simplifying the situation, or ignoring the science, or fudging the logic. 

(In SHIELD's analytics, the demographics and strategies are tabled and listed and detailed, but over bagels and tuna sandwiches in the lunch room they just cut it down to "AYMs" to save breath.)

They want the ones who were looking for them and didn't realise it. When you're fishing for angry young men on the internet, you can just set your nets and trawl.

***

This is as far as most of them get - just voices on the internet, joining together and festering in their corners. There are anarchist offshoots, fascist offshoots, communist offshoots, offshoots of no particular ideology except not liking the other guys on the board they used to be on. They fight amongst each other and call each other trolls, or false flags, or weak. Sometimes a voice will go quiet and it's chalked up to the usual list: a change of heart, or suicide, or jail. 

If the questioning stage was the training ground, this is more like the proving ground. This is where they are watched. 

This is where they channel out the ones who are too pragmatic to be called cruel or too smart to be called ruthless. They turn them into proselytisers and set them off to find the voices who are waiting to be answered, and this suits them, because these conversations are just a way to fill time between getting home from work and going to bed. And then, maybe, they graduate them further, invite them to a meeting somewhere, and that story goes off on its own...

But the cruel ones, the ruthless ones, the ones for whom a prison spell is only a matter of time - these, they continue to mould. 

They look at the questions that brought them here and suggest, perhaps, a racial element to the government's tyranny. A gendered one. A sexual one. An economic one. They say, they are trying to privilege this group. They say, look around you. Don't you see it?

And of course, since they know their man, they know he sees it. They know he sees it very close to home. They know he sees it on the bus in the morning, or on the floor below him at work, or all around him on campus. 

And they set that pot to boil and turn their attentions elsewhere. 

***

And so, eventually, a newspaper somewhere lists a bashing, or a rape, or a murder. Maybe it isn't noticed; maybe it becomes part of the background radiation of society. Maybe all it boils down to is a point of a point in an annual report somewhere, a small upswing in violent crime in a town - except, after all, it isn't happening in just one town, in just one year.

And then, years later, maybe someone will look at the numbers and think, this isn't right. Someone should do something about this. Someone should crack down on these people. 

This is the snow beginning to shift. 

The heads of HYDRA are many.


End file.
